The Traditonal Opera Of Countryside And Its Social Meaning In Media Age-A Case Study Of Xing Yuan Pu

Along with"the global village"predicted by Marshall McLuhan coming ture, itis absolutely clear that our current cultural formation has been saturated with massmedia representations in genaral, and televion in particular. The mass media and thevisual turning thereof impact on the inheriting and innovating of the Chinesetraditional culture, especially the traditional Chinese opera,which has been mediatizedby television, movie,internet, and other technology based media. As the most typicalrepresention of Chinese traditional culture, the traditional opera has a lot of spectatorsin the countrysides, hence it is an inevitable issue that what the coexistence ofdifferent mediatized formations of the opera impact on the people's aesthetics andcultural innovation in the countrysides.Taking Xing Yuan Pu villige as observed subject, this dissertation explores thenew cultural innovation arising from the multiple formation of the traditional opera inthe countrysides and the deep meaning thereof, showing that the different visualmedia of the traditional opera shapes different"visual scenes", which on the one handsatisfies all kinds of aethestic demands of villgers, on the other hand brings out theloss of the traditional opera scenes and supression of villagers' dynamic role. Amongthe complicated media environment of traditional opera, the villagers, connecting theenergy of the traditional opera with their subjective initiative and inspired by themedia technology, create their own culture and form the cultural community with thetraditional opera as the core. Xing Yuan Pu is a typical represention and a microcosmof chinese rural soceity, which implicits the new possibility of the rural culturaldevelopment in China.The structure of this dissertation can be divided into three sections: preface, textand epilogue.The first chapter is the introduction, which focuses on the literature review,discussing the possibility and limitation of the research combining visual culturestudy with the traditional opera study.The second part includes the three chapters, beginning with the story of filmsmaking of villagers in Xing Yuan Pu, pointing out that different visual media of thetraditional opera shapes different"visual scenes", which include live theatre,television,movie and internet.The third part is composed of the fifth and the sixth chapter, summarizing themediatized culture of the traditional opera theoretically based on the fieldinvestigation in Xing Yuan Pu. It points out that different scenes in which thespectators watch opera shape different visual experience, reflecting the powerstruggling for the visual fields. Villagers'conscious activity in Xing Yuan Pu providesanother way to resolve the conflict between the traditional opera and the visual media.We are now in the era interpenetrated and controlled by the public media, whichcauses an alienated society of the spectacles. The media culture of the traditionalopera and the villagers'cultural practice not only provide us a way to think about thefate of the traditional opera and connection between the visual media and the traditional opera, but also bring forth a new viewpoint of restoring the human activityin the society of the spectacles.